And as we’ve still got some spaghetti and the bolognese sauce from the order, I decided to make a different character for my record. After some thought I decided to make another one of those princess since lots of people asking me about that so I intended to make them all as soon as possible.

This time was Cinderella’s turn. While the Cinderella story already being told from hundreds of year ago and made into opera, theater, ballet, and movies, I think the most popular is the Disney’s version where I based mine. I couldn’t remember when was the last time I saw Cinderella, but the story is so classic that I’m pretty sure almost anyone know it. We even had this Indonesian version of Cinderella live action movie made in seventies, although I forgot the whole plot (but I’m sure it’s the same since it’s a Disney’s rip-off) and only remember the actress who play Cinderella.

Compared with the other princesses, Cinderella looks older than the others, but maybe it’s because the hair style. The pasta cut is like the usual princess cut; base, upper dress part, hair, face, lips, eyes, eyebrows, and nose line.

For the bento itself, we’ve got spaghetti, ragu bolognese served with shredded cheese and chopped parsley, chicken sausage with omelet shaped like flower, corn, broccoli chunk, cherry tomato, strawberry, and orange slice. I like this bigger container that it can store more foods. And I don’t know why the spaghetti looked very cluttered in the picture while it looked quite okay in real. I also added a slipper and the pumpkin coach pasta from our pasta collection to matched Cinderella theme for this kyaraben.

Personally I don’t know much about Ultraman, even I know the character since a long time ago, I watched some of episodes when I was little but I don’t have a lot memories of them. From my search, I found out that Ultraman made his debut in 1967 and still around until today. After much searching I found a perfect picture for Ultraman kyaraben. I photoshoped it a bit to make the picture doable for cutting.

Although the picture looks simple, but those little parts were very hard to cut, the right knuckle and the mouth also quite hard to cut. But the overall result was good and I like it, looks retro in style and the pose has a very dynamic feel to it. I just hope that the children will love it.

I managed to take the picture for all the Ultraman kyaraben I’ve made that day. The overall line up is quite nice, the consistency for each pasta cut is also good that they don’t look differ from each other much.

I used the usual mymealbox bento filling, chicken nuggets with beef sausages, corn, broccoli chunk, orange slice, and strawberry jelly.

I picked Pororo and friends for the theme because Pororo is Jojo’s favorite TV shows right now. But I also like them all, they’re very cheerful, cute and colorful characters.For those of you who doesn’t know Pororo the Little Penguin, it’s a computer generated cartoon series from Korea. The series revolves around the adventures of Pororo and his friends who live in the snowy village of Porong Porong Forest, who often encounter challenges and learn practical and moral lessons in each episode.

For the preparation, I made all the colored pasta a day before, total of 12 (twelve) different colors; white, fuschia, dark brown, yellow, red, black, light brown, blue, orange, gold, green, and pink. And for the whole cutting process was quite long, I’ve spent about more than 2 hours to finish all six characters.

As for the whole plating, I really wanted to serve this in a big bento box like the one the Japanese moms use for picnic bento but since I don’t have any I just used a big plate. Since this is for celebration, we make ‘nasi tumpeng’ with all its condiments. In Indonesia (specially in Java), we serve ‘nasi tumpeng’ to celebrate a special occasion such as birthday, inauguration, graduation, and all other happy moments. The rice should be served in a big cone shape, that’s why it’s called ‘tumpeng’.

‘Tumpeng’ comes from the ancient tradition of Indonesian people that honors the mountain as the dwelling place of ancestral spirits (ancestors) and gods. The cone shaped rice is meant to imitate the sacred mountain. The celebration is a form of gratitude and thanks to the Almighty for the abundant harvest and other blessings. Because it contained values of gratitude and celebration, we often served ‘tumpeng’ for any kind of celebration.

I served the yellow rice flat in bento style for simplicity so I could nicely put the Pororo and friends (without any intention to diminish the value of ‘tumpeng’ itself). The menu is a standard ‘tumpeng’ style, yellow rice cooked with coconut milk, fried chickens, potato cake (perkedel kentang), caramelized tempeh, spicy eggs, and slices of (Japanese) cucumber. The cherry tomatoes and strawberries are not the usual condiments for ‘tumpeng’, I just used them to add some colors since most of the food were brown and yellow. Usually there are other condiments but since there’s only four of us (five including Jojo, our driver didn’t come that day) we could not eat that much.

With this post I also would like to thanks our customers who entrust us to provide our kyaraben for the birthday or other celebrations of their children. This means a lot for us. We understand that we deliver each orders on someone’s very important day, we always take care each of our kyaraben personally like we prepare food for our own children, with love and care. I’m the happiest person if our bento can brighten up those children day.

This is also a good time for me to reflect on our journey this past six months. I think that for something that started as a hobby a year ago until 500 delivered bento and counting is a good step up. Some said to me that we should deliver more but I restrict myself not to advertise yet, this site, the facebook page, and mymealbox flickr page are our only promotional outlet and all of them are not hard selling tools. Jojo’s mommy did post some of our kyaraben on several forum but maybe now it’s time for us to start step up a bit to make ourselves being known more since my target is to deliver another 500 bento in next 3 months up until we can deliver 500 bento each week sometime next year. I know it’s very ambitious but it’s very possible with the right mind set, planning, preparation, and organization, I’m sure that we can pull it off.

I think that’s all for today post. We will take two weeks break since fasting season will be over soon and all of our assistant will be gone to their hometown at the end of this week. We will also leave Jakarta for several days to visit our family in Bandung.

Thanks for reading this, if you haven’t click our facebook ‘Like’ button please do so, I will be planning something special next time you visit

The team still exhausted from the Monday order of 60 bento, and being in fasting period, I could not push them too hard so I need to take care most of the thing by myself. And we had Jojo at home for the whole day, which could slow things down if he wanted me to play and spending time with him. So I woke up at 5 a.m. to start cutting parts for this Special Agent Oso. While the shapes were quite simple (compared to princesses’) but still doing all 40 (there were total of 18 parts for each Oso, so I needed to cut total of 720 parts) alone was quite daunting.

So I started cutting all those parts with my iPod as companion. You can only doing this kind of task at maximum 2 hours and you need having a break. I took my break and went to groceries store to buy all the vegetables and meat for the order. Back at home I continued cutting until lunch time so I could have lunch with Jojo. After the lunch I started preparing all the food that can be prepared a day before and then accompanying Jojo taking a nap (which I sorely need also).

I only took 1 hour nap which is enough (if I slept more I’m sure that I couldn’t finish cutting on time). So I continue cutting all those pasta until 6 p.m. and manage to finish them all, yay But then Jojo’s nanny said that we need to bring some traditional food for tomorrow independence day celebration at Jojo’s school, sigh

So I went out again to buy anything that still available at store and back home to start assembling those pasta. While the cutting takes lots of time, the assembling process also takes times if only done by one person. I assembled one by one while Jojo was watching some Playhouse Disney, having his dinner, went upstairs playing with nanny, and then went downstairs again looking for me. It was already 9.50 p.m. and he won’t sleep without me.

I said to him that if he wanted us to sleep together then he must wait until I finished my job, having dinner, and taking a bath. Surprisingly he agreed without any complain. So he sat down at the dinner chair waiting for me finish until 10.10 p.m and then I took my dinner. We talked lots of thing while I was eating and I must say that was the nicest conversation I had with my son. With only lights on only at our dining room and the silent night ambient over us somehow Jojo was very calm (usually he’s very restless all day long) and we could talk some important things that I couldn’t manage to do before.

I really must thank God for this very rare opportunity. Suddenly all my tiredness was gone and I felt very fresh. I took my bath while Jojo waiting at the bedroom and we went sleep. Of course I must woke up again at 4 a.m. to finish this project.

We’re preparing like we used to do all this time, since we keep the same team from the beginning I felt that we now can work more efficiently and the whole team already know what to do without me making all the instructions. To my surprise we finished around 6.00 a.m. which I think was very fast since the initial target was 7 a.m. The delivery time was 10 a.m. but the location was very far so I thought that I need around 2 hours driving. But then somehow the traffic was so light that I managed to arrive at 8 a.m. Luckily the school start at 8.30 a.m. so I could meet my client earlier.

While luck was on my side in the morning but then its already leaving me while I went home since it took me 2.5 hours but I’m always in a great mood after delivering on time ^_^

I’d like this project because it’s been a while that we’ve got order for Naruto. And Naruto always has a special place to us, mymealbox team, because he’s the first kyaraben project we’ve done. I’d never forget all the troubles we’ve gotten ourselves into to finish the project, but we’ve got lots of experiences from it and I think that we’ve learned so much from that project that it really drove us so far until today.

So with that in mind, I went back to my old picture files and decided to revisit our first project. I used the same Naruto picture but made different approach for the character.  I don’t use egg sheet to make kyaraben anymore unless my customer ask for it, since pasta sheet has better consistency and easier to cut.

With better preparation we managed to create better detailed Naruto this time with all the whiskers and more detailed eyeballs, so it’s quite an improvement than our first time.

The other kyaraben for this project was Princess Ariel. I made Ariel sample for our other client but somehow it didn’t work out but apparently there’s someone who like her also. I used the same template as the sample since I liked what I made, so I won’t write the details again (details for Princess Ariel production can be read here).

The biggest problem of creating princesses we had was the character consistency. When we first making Belle, I felt that there’s too much inconsistency with our final product. While they all were hand made (which we can use as an excuse) but still we need to keep the result looked more the similar with each other. And finally with this Princess Ariel, I think we managed to do that.

If we look from the top view and we compare each of the Ariel, the consistency is there to see, which I’m quite proud of. Maybe it’s because I’ve made so many princesses (more than a hundred and counting) that my hand is getting used to cut those tiny curves (those lips are vicious to cut, you can get your finger cut for losing concentration). I would like to say that we’ve managed to upgrade our quality to the next step which is important and we need to keep maintaining it while try to improve further.

And while we’re talking about quality, I really want to compare our work with other. It’s good to have a healthy competition so we can keep up and learn from each other. I haven’t got the time to look around but from my last search I didn’t find someone else who’s doing what we do. Of course there are thousands bento makers out there but I haven’t found other who make kyaraben catering. If some of you knew please let me know then, and thanks before

From the top view, it’s also obvious that I need a new camera (like GF1, hint hint) to produce better quality picture